the healing of colombia 73
What makes this story different from other
episodes of horror and heartbreak in Colombia
is that the people of El Salado came back. In a
stubborn return to this most unlikely promised
land, the Saladeros took back their town two
years after the killings, clearing the tropical
vines that had climbed across roads, up walls,
and into every empty room, whitewashing the
adobe houses, and replanting the tobacco fields
that had provided a tolerable income not so long
before. There was no school for the children, but
Mayito Padilla, by then 12 years old, decided to
start one on her own, including literacy drills and
the multiplication tables, and a history course in
which her 37 students went over their own expe-
riences so as not to forget the terrible events of
the recent past.
Today, El Salado and Colombia are transform-
ing their grim heritage. The girl now known as
“Miss Mayito” worked her way through a degree
in early childhood education and became the
head of community relations in her hometown.
And after half a century in which the war circled
repeatedly in on itself, and after four years of
painstaking negotiations, the country’s oldest
guerrilla group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolu-
cionarias de Colombia—or FARC, by its Spanish
initials—turned over the last of its weapons in
June 2017 to a United Nations team. By then the
entire country had been reshaped by violence.
Now a lasting peace will have to be won, inch by
inch. El Salado, with its head start on reconstruc-
tion, has given people hope that the country too
can heal.
the realitY is that in the two centuries since
it gained independence from Spain, Colombia
has rarely been without violent conflict. Some
would argue that the latest cycle of bloodshed
began on April 9, 1948, with the assassination